Posts

AWS security

Aka ‘DARK WEB HACKER COST ME $1600 SHOCK HORROR !’

After I set up my Jekyll site and uploaded the content to Amazon S3 using ‘s3website’, I remember thinking ‘I must re-read that section about securing the configuration file with AWS credentials in plain text’.

If the source code of your website is publicly available, ensure that the s3website.yml file is in the list of ignored files. For git users this means that the file .gitignore should mention the s3website.yml file.

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GIT tutorial for SVN users

I have used CVS and then SVN for version control. As I now use GIT for a couple of projects, I found this set of GIT tutorials very useful as they are well-written, use plenty of examples and outline where and how GIT differs from Subversion.

from GitHub pages to Amazon S3

Although hosting on GitHub pages is an excellent option, I decided to move this blog to Amazon S3, mainly because I have used S3 before. Also GitHub pages only supports a limited set of Jekyll plugins and I wanted more flexibility to add any plugin and (potentially) run a different version of Jekyll.

I also took the opportunity to switch the theme to the rather minimalistic but stylish Poole and installed the useful s3website utility to automatically synchronise the static site to Amazon S3. As you are charged for upload/download traffic, an intelligent sync process (rather than uploading everything) for deployment is important.

Welcome

Welcome…to the atrocity exhibition.

Fittingly, this site is powered by Jekyll and Github pages, but the precise details will probably take a series of 1,739 posts.

20 questions

‘Is she a werewolf ?

‘No’.

‘Does she have the ability to spontaneously transform into a fierce animal ?’

‘No’.

‘Is she a robot ?’

‘No’.

‘Is she a very early version of a robot that is running version 1.0.1 (alpha) of the software that meant she lost to that human-robot hybrid ?’

‘No’

‘Is she a normal human but just set 200 years in a post-apocalyptic world where water, fuel and sunlight are at a premium ?’

SIPP review

A lot of people write in and ask ‘Norman - whatever happened to that SIPP you started 10 years ago ? Has it produced enough to retire on ? Was it a lot of work ? Did it outperform the FTSE100 ?’

I took the ’long term buy and hold forever and ‘strategic ignorance’ ethos to its logical extreme and forgot about the SIPP completely. Once all the pension funds were transferred and a collection of high yielding UK shares purchased, I forgot about it. I didn’t sell any shares. I didn’t feverishly check the balance daily. I didn’t panic during the banking crisis of 2008. I didn’t respond to any corporate actions. Occasionally, I bought a new share once enough funds had accumulated from dividend payments.

Grimm Viewing

‘Is this Grimm ?’

‘No’

‘Adventures of New Grimm ?’

‘No’

‘New adventures of Grimm ?’

‘No’

‘New: Adventures of New Grimm ?’

‘Yes’

‘Is this a repeat ?’

‘No’

Music For Sheep

People often write in and ask ‘Norman - just what is this mysterious “Music For Sheep” playlist of which you speak ?’

‘Music For Sheep’ is my favourite music playlist of all time. It has provided solace and hope during some pretty bleak times. The playlist is ironically named as a tribute to all the social music sharing services like Spotify and last.fm which encourage sharing of your favourite bands, music and playlists. This is a novelty for 12 minutes but, ultimately a bit irrelevant because, as I remarked way back in 2006:

where are they now ?

People often write in and ask ‘Is Oracle blogging dead ?’

Well, I thought it might be interesting to revisit the list of Oracle blogs I posted way back in 2007 and see what they’re up to.

• Life After Coffee - dead (last post May 2011). The pressure of the No. 1 slot proved too much.
• The Tom Kyte Blog - frequency much reduced but Tom’s a busy man.
• Rittman Mead - now a multi-user, shiny, corporate blog.
• Oracle Scratchpad - Jonathan Lewis is still going strong.
• Eddie Awad …so is Eddie.
• Doug Burns - Our favourite Scotsman is still active and contemplating a migration away from Serendipity.
• Kevin Closson - occasional poster.
• David Aldridge - as above (when something annoys him).
• Tim Hall - still travelling the world, presenting, reading books and watching weird films.
• Jeff Hunter - resting (inactive since May 2012).
• Peter Scott - alive and well blogging under the Rittman Mead umbrella.
• Andrew Clarke - sporadic flurries of activity from Tooting.
• Chris Foot - not known at this address.
• William Robertson - still manages to exclaim ‘WTF?!’ once a year.
• Howard Rogers - still blogging from Down Under.
• Robert Vollman - resting (since August 2012).
• Andy Campbell - hijacked by spammers. Either that or he really is pimping satellite TV systems and payday loans.
• Moans Norgaard - pining for the fjords (since July 2010).
• Laurent Schneider - actively blogging about Oracle.
• Lisa Dobson - went to the trouble of getting her own domain and then neglected it (since Sept 2011). No longer a ’newbie'.
• Jeff Moss - pimping vacations in Florida.
• Beth - Data Geek Gal has been quiet on data quality (since Oct 2012).
• Steve Karam - the alchemist is busy mixing up strange concoctions involving Hadoop, Hue, Oozie and occasionally Oracle.
• Eric Emrick - nothing since March 2009.
• Alex Gorbachev - busy growing Pythian Corp.
• Robert Baillie - blogging about Agile, Extreme and project management after a 3 year lull.
• Gary Myers - moved house (still in Oz) but helpfully remembered the redirect.
• Nuno Souto - still blogging from Sydney.
• Daniel Fink - The Optimal DBA blog has been dropped with constraints cascaded - which is suboptimal.
• Ed Whalen - wrote a popular book in 2011, got rich on the proceeds and retired in the Caribbean.

Kingstonian FC 4 Grays Athletic 0

Saturday 7 September was non-league day. There were no Premiership fixtures and Kingstonian FC had a number of offers to attract football supporters down to Kingsmeadow (half price admission for any season ticket holder).

I had attended Kingstonian’s opening home league fixture and been pretty impressed by the new players recruited by Alan Dowse and the quality of the play in a 3-0 victory over Enfield Town so, on a sunny afternoon, I paid my second visit of the season to watch the K’s.